from the it's-about-lining-his-own-pocket dept

Nicolas Chartier is the CEO of Voltage Pictures, a very high-profile movie studio, thanks mainly to producing some critically acclaimed films like Hurt Locker and Dallas Buyers Club. For the past five years, Chartier has also been known as an over-the-top, somewhat ridiculous copyright troll, thinking that it's smart to sue thousands of fans of his films. When this began, someone sent him a very polite email, explaining why he thought suing fans was a bad idea that might backfire, and Chartier responded by calling him a moron and a thief. Chartier doesn't seem particularly thoughtful, but is very, very emotional about this stuff.

The Hollywood Reporter has a big interview with Chartier where he continues to make ridiculous statements, often without any foundation, and also undermines Hollywood's carefully crafted narrative about how its fight against piracy is really about protecting the jobs of the little guys, the union workers who work on films. Creative Future, the astroturf group set up by Hollywood to push for stronger copyright laws and to attack innovative services that threaten its obsolete business model, likes to trot out the "little guys" who work on movies, and highlights that it's a partnership between the studios and the unions. Yet, in the interview Chartier repeats his attacks on union works in Hollywood and points out that he films outside of the country to avoid paying them:

Bruce Willis makes a million a day, but we make the movie because of Bruce Willis. But at the same time, when I see a union driver sitting for 12 hours and being really difficult, that's why we end up shooting a lot of movies in foreign countries. People don't understand that without movie stars making big money, there's no movie. It's nice to victimize the big stars, but we need that because otherwise we don't make the movie. I don't make the movie because of the driver.

Yup, this is all about the rich getting richer, and Chartier apparently has no problem admitting that he'd screw over the everyday workers on films when he can. The fight over these things has never been about the everyday worker. They get paid their standard rate no matter what the film does. The issue is over the fat cats at the top. Also, that line about the movie only getting made because of the stars? Yeah, that's not exactly true either. As we've discussed in the past, there's no evidence that having a big name movie star helps a film do any better. It's just because Hollywood is so sucked into this vortex of believing that a "name" makes a movie that it focuses on that. That isn't to say that good acting isn't important. Great actors can make a real difference, but the idea that a big name is necessary to make a big film simply isn't supported by the evidence.

But Chartier isn't big on evidence or facts. He just makes up whatever he wants -- like his claim that the day after they announced plans to sue Hurt Locker downloaders, people suddenly stopped downloading the movie:

And the day after we announced 20,000 lawsuits, the Internet downloads of Hurt Locker went down about 40 percent. So, you know, you frighten people and then they stop.

Yeah, that didn't happen. And, really, in this day and age, if you're still going to claim that every download is a lost sale, it suggests you haven't put much (if any) thought into what's going on:

Hurt Locker ended up winning six Oscars, but at the same time we had 8 million illegal downloads on the movie. And I was like, "Wow, you know, we barely reimbursed the movie and we had 8 million illegal downloads." Well, if everybody had given me one dollar, that would be 8 million dollars, and the movie cost 11, so we lost 80 percent of the movie to piracy. That cannot hold

Or, you know, there are people like me who didn't see the movie, but wanted to. And then you sued all those downloaders and it got crossed off the list of movies I would rent. Ditto for any other Voltage picture. To this day, I've never seen a single one of them, and I know I'm not the only person to do so. Those are true "lost sales" because I absolutely intended to pay to see the movie. But now I won't. Unlike most of the people who downloaded who never would have paid. It's like Chartier doesn't even understand what battle he's really fighting.

He should be looking for ways to get more people to see movies. Instead, he's fighting ghosts: people who would never pay. It's not too different from his fight against the everyday people who work on his movies. He's pushing to keep down how much they pay while happily paying stars many millions. While he may have a knack for picking good movies, he doesn't seem to have much business sense, always fighting the wrong fight.

from the so,-who-protects-members-from-their-representatives? dept

Last summer, the American Federation of Musicians hit videogame composer Austin Wintory (Monaco, Journey) with a $50,000 fine for working on The Banner Saga in violation of its (nonexistent) game music contract. Thanks to the union's own stubbornness and greed, none of its members were allowed to compose music for videogames. A contract put together in 2012 without the input of AFM's members was so skewed towards the union that no videogame producers were willing to agree to it. (It wasn't until 2014 that Microsoft agreed to the terms of AFM's revamped contract. It remains the sole company to do so.)

A long-running dispute between video game composer Austin Wintory and his union, the American Federation of Musicians, has come to a head this week: Variety reports that Wintory has refused to pay a $2,500 fine imposed by the AFM for his non-union work as a composer on The Banner Saga.

The union has threatened to expel him if he doesn't pay up by January 19th. Wintory is investigating his legal options to combat such a decision, and has offered to write a $2,500 check to the L.A.-based Education Through Music charity in lieu of paying the union fine.

Wintory is weighing his options. A good one would seem to be telling AFM where to stick its toys (and contracts) and ditching the union altogether. But that can have an adverse effect on finding work in other union-heavy industries, like movies and regular, old non-videogame music. These entities tend to require the hiring of union members, so the lack of an AFM card could keep Wintory from being hired should he choose to branch out.

Other AFM members have worked around the union's stupid videogame contract by recording in Nashville (Tennessee is a right-to-work state) or overseas. Wintory incensed his "representatives" by ditching Los Angeles -- an area it firmly controls -- in favor of London, which was cheaper, didn't hit the game's producer for additional "future use" fees and didn't force anyone to adhere to a one-sided contract. So, it's still out to get its pound of flesh in hopes of discouraging other members from bypassing the contract they were never given the chance to agree to.

Meanwhile, the Recording Musicians Association (RMA), the “player conference” within the AFM that represents many studio musicians, announced over the weekend that the union had concluded negotiations with the AMPTP on a new multiyear contract for recording TV and film scores.

Details of the pact, however, were being kept under wraps Sunday. Musicians are expected to be informed of the details late Monday during meetings of the RMA and Local 47 membership.

So, who's working for who? Unions are supposed to represent their members. That's why members pay fees. AFM seems to genuinely have no concern about the well-being of its artists. (It doesn't care much for the general public either.) It fines them when they seek to do work they've been locked out of by a contract they never wanted and it keeps its negotiations with other entities secret until the ink has dried on all the signatures -- none of which belong to the members supposedly being "represented."

from the wonder-how-that-happened... dept

We've been covering the efforts by Hollywood studios to push extreme draconian new copyright laws down in Australia, where their interests are being helped along by the Attorney General George Brandis, who has a cozy relationship with Hollywood, but cannot present any evidence he's ever met with consumer advocates. Brandis pushed out his proposal earlier this year and it was basically Hollywood's wishlist, exactly as many expected. The Australian government has been accepting "comments" on the proposal, and there have been some interesting submissions. Perhaps most interesting was that the Media, Entertainment, and Arts Alliance (MEAA), a union that represents a combination of both journalists and entertainers, put in a comment supporting the extreme proposal for an internet censorship regime via filtering. You can understand why some of the more shortsighted folks on the "entertainer" side of the union might support such a policy, but the idea that a journalist's union would do so as well seems... troubling.

The MEAA proposal said that it "strongly supports the proposal" and even talks up (incorrectly) how useful similar censorship efforts have been in the UK. However, it appears that many MEAA members quite reasonably freaked out to find out that their own union was advocating "strongly" in favor of censorship and internet filters -- because hours later, MEAA withdrew its comments saying that the whole thing was all a big mistake:

It was never our intention to make a submission which could in any way be interpreted as supporting an internet filter.

We have previously campaigned against Government proposals for an internet filter and will continue to do so, as we also continue to campaign against data retention.

That's funny, because in the submission itself they directly talked about how amazingly awesome such a filter in the UK was. Huh. It's almost as if someone simply took some talking points from Hollywood without any real understanding of the deeper issues of what they were supporting, and submitted it -- only to realize afterwards that they were a media union endorsing out and out censorship.

from the rethinking-collective-bargaining dept

A random factoid about my past that some people don't know is that I have a degree in "industrial and labor relations," which involved an awful lot of learning about the history of unions, collective bargaining and the like. While I firmly believe that most unions today are counterproductive (frequently holding back innovation and flexibility), the idea certainly made quite a lot of sense in the early days, in which you had parties (giant employers) with near total market power over employees who had absolutely no market power. Basically, many companies were market abusers, and they abused freely. Organizing workers for collective bargaining was a way to even the playing field slightly. That it later resulted in vast amounts of corruption and cronyism, let alone hindering the way in which companies could innovate and adapt, are certainly big issues to be concerned about -- but there were reasons why that happened as well (driven by leadership on both sides).

But, still, when you have a vast mismatch in market power, with one side being an effective monopoly, and the other side being dispersed among many people, there is a certain appeal to collective bargaining. And that appears to be the root appeal of an idea percolating over on Reddit right now for an ISP Consumers Union, inspired by a Reddit comment from a few days ago. The basic thinking is that if the FCC and Congress aren't all that interested in preventing big broadband company fuckery, then perhaps the consumers should take it into their own hands, join forces, and negotiate as a unified force with the ISPs. A bunch of folks have jumped into the discussion and are talking about a variety of different facets, from what the "union" would have the power to do to the legal issues to the administrative aspects of the whole thing.

There's something profoundly interesting about this from a few different angles. I have no idea if something like this will actually come together for real, let alone work, but the effective "market conditions" do match those that led to the rise of organized labor, with a few "monopolists" abusing their power to treat people (in that case, workers, in this case, broadband subscribers) poorly. The situation is certainly not identical, but there are parallels. Broadband access today is certainly considered by many to be as important as a job a century ago. In fact, many consider it essential to having a job. And, yet, there remain very few broadband providers and the big ones all have pretty long histories of abusive practices. That said, the "abuses" certainly pale in comparison to the way that big oil and steel companies treated workers in the late 19th century, but it's not a completely crazy concept.

Would people care enough to make a difference? And what legitimate bargaining power would they have? People could "strike" by cancelling their service. Or they could organize to move en masse to a competitor -- if there is a competitor. The whole concept is undeniably fascinating. While I'd still worry about the same ills that later plagued (and still plague, though not always to the same levels) organized labor, one would hope that with some knowledge of what went wrong there, an ISP Consumers Union could avoid some of those pitfalls. Frankly, the biggest problem with unions (and, again, this was often driven by company management) was viewing "management" and "labor" as being diametrically opposed forces, rather than different parties with different needs but an overall focus on a similar goal. That is, even when labor hated management, driving a big company out of business entirely was certainly worse than figuring out ways to get things done. The problem was that the two sides were often so antagonistic, that bargaining itself became a war of spite, rather than each side understanding the overall issues, and working out compromises so that everyone could be better off.

It's entirely possible that an ISP Consumer Union could eventually be plagued by similar issues -- making unwarranted demands on broadband providers that make it impossible for them to remain in business. But, as a way to hack around the current (failed) politics of net neutrality, and present an alternative option, one that is much more bottom up than top down, is absolutely fascinating.

At the same time, it's also profoundly depressing that broadband consumers of today have that much in common with laborers at the dawn of the industrial revolution...

from the workers-unite? dept

It's a strange thing to me when a union, say, the American Federation of Musicians, turns on one of its own members or even non-member musicians. Now, I'm supportive of the concept of organized labor as a general idea, though I certainly recognize that unions quite frequently fall into all the same trappings of any unwieldy and large organization -- where the original intent and the eventual results are quite different. So when the AFM demanded an apology from a musical artist simply for speaking his mind against a Canadian bill that the union supported, I could only scratch my head. But when that same AFM union goes after one of it own members for the crime of making video game music, a thing that I love, that's when I start to get really angry.

What's most striking in that video to me is the clear and obvious passion with which composer Austin Wintory speaks about working on game music. Still, the back story here is what makes it so ridiculous. AFM management constructed a contract for video game composers without the input of the union's own membership, a contract that is so one-sided that not a single game developer even hesitated to reject it completely, and constructed an ecosystem in which no AFM member could be hired with union sanction to perform his or her craft. For two years, the music in games was either made by composers not in the AFM or by composers who just ignored the AFM's rules. The union failed to benefit in any way. Then, when it discovered that one of its members, who had been vocally critical of the contract, had the gumption to actually make a living, the union threatened to levy a $50,000 fine against him.

Unions have a terrible reputation in this country because of stories like this, which is a shame. This union is an example of how not to behave, in making demands that will never be accepted, refusing to consult its own membership, actually coming out and suggesting that it chiefly operates through fear and intimidation, and going after its own members for daring to make a living doing what they do best (the kind of thing a union should be supporting, not hindering).

"Unfortunately employers have not signed the current agreement," admits AFM Local 47 Vice President John Acosta who represent the recording musicians of Los Angeles, "and the limited work we were doing before has all but vanished into non-union land."

And the solution to that is to levy fines against one of your members instead of negotiating a contract that will actually get composers back to work under the union umbrella? Please.

from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept

Labor disputes can certainly get nasty at times, but Porter Airlines out of Canada has filed a $4 million libel lawsuit against some striking fuel workers based on tweets they sent out, which the airline claims involved "false and misleading information about safety protocols and training practices" by the airline. The strikers, who only just unionized last year, include just 22 workers who handle helping to fuel up the planes. Their twitter account, @PorterStrike, only had about 200 followers at the time (though it's now up to a whopping 400). The union quickly hit back, saying that the tweets were protected free speech, and no different than typical striking talk by union members:

“Before Twitter and social media, these things would have been said in a union hall and on a leaflet,” said COPE Ontario legal representative Glenn Wheeler. “The Charter of Rights provides for free expression, freedom of association. So we think we are in our constitutional rights to offer our version of the way we see things. That’s fair comment.”

That's an interesting choice of words, because he doesn't actually say that the statements were true, which would be the best defense to libel. However, even if the statements were questionable, one has to wonder how much actual "damage" they might do. One would like to expect that statements made by striking workers against their employer would already be viewed through a specific prism, and given how few Twitter followers there were, you'd have to imagine that Porter would have a difficult time showing any actual harm from the tweets in question. Separately, I wonder how much more of a reputational hit the company will take for suing less than two dozen striking workers for $4 million over some tweets...

from the which-lies dept

The big Hollywood unions who supported SOPA and PIPA (even as many of their own members disagreed) have finally come out with their own statement on the whole PIPA/SOPA thing, and like the other supporters we've seen, it too, is totally tone deaf to what happened. Rather than recognizing the problems of the bill, it's obnoxious and condescending:

We recognize that we are currently part of a complex and important debate about the future, not just of the Internet but also of creativity, the American economy, free expression, and a civil society. We believe that the light should be being shined on every aspect of this discussion and on all of those who have a stake in it. We believe we should discuss what an unregulated ‘free’ Internet means for the future of content, just as we should also discuss the importance of an open Internet.

We welcome this debate. We hope a new tone can be set and it is not one that turns our advocacy for this legislation into an implication that we promote censorship. Our commitment to the First Amendment is decades old and long established – it is a matter of public record from long before the word ‘Internet’ was part of anyone’s vocabulary. If one truly embraces free expression, they do not take down the Library of Congress websites, the very symbol of our country’s belief in knowledge and learning. We would hope a new tone can be set that does not pit the creativity and innovation of our directors, actors, performers, craftspeople, and technicians against those innovators in other industries. We hope a new tone can be set that does not include website attacks, blacklists, blackouts, and lies. We believe an Internet that does not allow outright stealing has to be the Internet of the future or all the promises it holds will be unrealized.

First of all, the internet is not "unregulated" -- no matter how many times they insist it is. Second, given what we saw with Megaupload, it's pretty ridiculous to think that the US cannot (and does not) currently have the tools to go after foreign sites (in fact, there is some evidence that it has too many tools with too much power). But, really, what strikes me as ridiculous about this statement is that it attacks everyone whose opinion they totally ignored for over a year -- and then pretends that it wants to set a conciliatory tone? If you want "a new tone" to take place, let's start with you guys not calling people who raised legitimate concerns liars.

More importantly, if we're going to talk about "lies," let's start with the claims of "losses" that have widely been debunked, but which were used to put forth this legislation. Let's talk about the lies about the legislation being "narrowly targeted" when pretty much every legal analysis worried about its broad definitions. Let's talk about the lies that the legislation would not censor free speech -- when even the big First Amendment lawyer you presented to support this bill admitted that protected speech would be taken down under these laws.

Don't accuse others of lying when your side has a much bigger, much longer, much more detailed history of lying. Did some of those against the bills misunderstand them and present false information? Yes. But these are people who aren't used to reading legislation and may have missed key points. On the side of you and your lobbyists, you knew exactly what you were doing. I find that a lot more pernicious.

from the losing-your-own-members dept

The opposition to SOPA and PIPA continues to come from all sorts of places. The latest interesting one? Union members who work on movies and TV... whose bosses signed them up as supporters of SOPA and PIPA against their wishes. They've put together a petition urging the MPAA, IATSE, IBT, WGA, SAG, DGA, and AFTRA to formally oppose both SOPA and PIPA, noting that it would be a barrier to innovation that Hollywood desperately needs, wouldn't actually stop infringement, and would also be an online security nightmare. The groups listed in the petition are basically all of the groups that have been major supporters of the bill, but as some of the signatories note, they want no part of this. Just a few examples:

I'm a proud Local One and USA829 member, and am appalled to find my union supporting this act. While I agree that piracy is bad, this act is ill-designed by legislators with no clue how the internet works, and guided by greedy corporations who have ulterior motives, and who have a track record of abusing the DMCA the same way they'll abuse this.

It will do nothing to stop it, will give unfettered power prone to abuse to corporations who don't deserve it, will short circuit due process, and will have huge unintended negative effects on the internet as a whole.

And, another one from a studio grip:

Proud Local 80 Motion Picture Studio Grip and I'm signing because these bills go too far. I'd like to think that IATSE is just trying to do what's best for its members. But, I think once they dig past the surface they will see the same thing I did. And that is that these bills need to be quashed. We need another way to deal with piracy.

Once again, for all the talk of widespread "support" of SOPA and PIPA, it seems to be crumbling in every direction, including from within the groups who have acted as if these bills were absolutely necessary.

from the first,-do-no-harm dept

I'm sure the prisoners welcome their new robot overlords, but I bet the prison guards union doesn't. Or any other union for that matter. And they're not alone. Over the past few weeks, tech industry commentators spent slightly more time than usual wringingtheirhands over whether technology was killing jobs. I think this video captures the debate pretty well.

It might sound paradoxical, but this replacement of humans by machines is actually a good reason to limit secondary liability for the robotics industry. And I'm not just referring to secondary liability in the copyright sense, but to any liability incurred by robot manufacturers because of how others use their robots.

This isn't a theoretical issue. Automation and efficiency have always threatened certain jobs and industries -- and one of the standard reactions is to somehow blame the technology itself and seek to hinder it, quite frequently by over-regulation. Of course, the extreme version of this is where the term "luddite" came from -- an organized effort to attack more efficient technology. Of course, that resulted in violence against the machines. More typical were overly burdensome regulations, such as "red flag laws," that said automobiles could only be driven if someone walked in front of them waving a red flag to "warn people" of the coming automobile. Supporters of this law, like supporters of secondary liability laws for robots, can and will claim that there are "legitimate safety reasons" for such laws and that the impact on holding back the innovation and extending the lifetime of obsolete jobs is just a mere side benefit. But like those red flag laws, applying secondary liability to robotics would significantly hinder a key area of economic growth.

Technology has been replacing human labor since humans invented, well, technology. But while technology may get rid of inefficient jobs, it eventually creates replacements. To cite one commonly-used example, the switched telephone network put operators out of a job, but it created plentiful new jobs for telemarketers (and other businesses that relied upon the packet-switched phone network... including everything built on and around the internet today). The problem is that while it was obvious how many operators would be out of a job, it wasn't immediately clear how lucrative (or annoying) telemarketing could be, let alone the eventual transformation of the phone lines into a vast global information sharing network, and the hundreds of millions of new jobs created because of it.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee examine this problem in detail in their book, which I recommend. But much of it boils down to this. Technology creates jobs, yet it's not obvious where the new jobs are, so we need bold, persistent experimentation to find them:

Parallel experimentation by millions of entrepreneurs is the best and fastest way to do that. As Thomas Edison once said when trying to find the right combination of materials for a working lightbulb: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Multiply that by 10 million entrepreneurs and you can begin to see the scale of the economy's innovation potential.

This is especially important for robotics. It's obvious how robots make certain jobs obsolete -- e.g. driverless cars don't need drivers -- but it's less clear what new job opportunities they open up. We need to try different things.

Unfortunately, secondary liability creates problems for robot manufacturers who open up their products for experimentation. Ryan Calo explains this in more detail, but the basic problem is that, unlike computers, robots can easily cause physical harm. And under product liability law in most states, when there's physical harm to person or property, everyone involved in the manufacturing and distribution of that product is legally liable.

Ideally, we'd want something like a robot app store. But robot manufacturers would be unwilling to embrace commercial distribution of third-party apps if it increased their chances of being sued. There's evidence that Section 230's safe harbors (and, to some extent, the DMCA'ssafe harbors) play a key role in facilitating third-party content on the web. Absent a similar provision for robots, manufacturers are more likely to limit their liability by sticking to single-purpose robots or simply locking down key systems. That's fine, if we know exactly what we want our robots to do -- e.g. replace workers. But if we want robots to create jobs, it'd help to limit secondary liability for the robotics industry, open things up, and let widespread experiments happen freely.

from the acted-like-assclowns-to-boot dept

I've always struggled with the concept of unions and collective bargaining. The realist in me knows the history of employment in the early days of this country and how woefully employers treated their people. Early labor unions also had a heavy hand in social reforms for ideals like free public education. Yay, unions! On the other hand, we're all aware of the stories of waste and corruption among big union leadership, the inefficiencies they create in the workforce, and the potentially detrimental effects on the economic competitiveness of America in a global marketplace. Damn you, evil unions!

And so it's under this same conflicted backdrop that I read what SD sent in, a story about the University of California's teachers' union gleefully celebrating the blocking of online courses. More specifically, the union is saying the language in the contract would allow them to block any online course that would result in lessening employment statistics for the school's lecturers, which make up a hefty percentage of the teaching force. Let's tackle a couple of things relating to this story.

First, examine some words from Bob Samuels, President of the union and possible jerky-quote-producing-android-automaton:

“We feel that we could stop almost any online program through this contract. We feel we got something that the university didn’t really understand."

The article goes on to note:

"And stop it they would. Regardless of any data administrators trot out to argue that students learn just as well online as they do in the classroom, the union would do whatever it could to block the university from moving courses online if it decides the move would make life worse for lecturers, says Samuels."

Now, perhaps you're like me and any time you hear someone say something that so clearly dismisses anyone else's well-being aside from their own, your brain shuts down your ears for fear that your entire faith in the basic providence of humanity would be vanquished in an angry mind-fire. So let me break this down for you. Samuels, President of a union of teachers, is saying that they'll block online courses regardless of any evidence as to their efficacy if it results in even one less lecturer on campus. Learning? Rising costs in education for students? Technological progress? Unimportant, fools! This is where I think back to the union leaders of old, who pushed for social reforms effecting those outside their union members, and wonder where it all went wrong.

(Fun side note: Samuels recently wrote an article for the Huffington Post suggesting that we forgo Obama and the Tea Party in favor on an online activist party. WHAT!!??? And put all those businesses that spring up around both the Obama campaign and Tea Party rallies out of work!!?? You know who disagrees with Bob Samuels? Bob Samuels!)

And here's the really fun part. The University reviewed the langauge Samuels is referring to and promptly chuckled something close to, "what the duck is he talking about?"

“They do not have the power to block the university from implementing new online programs,” says Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for the Office of the President. The most the [union’s] bargaining unit could do,” Klein says, “is provide written notice saying, ‘We don’t like this.’ ”

I think what's most amazing to me in all of this is that apparently there aren't any Public Relations teachers willing to give Samuels a hand. If you want to gain public support for limiting online classes, it's possible. You come out with some kind of study or research suggesting the benefit of lecturers to the actual education process, you make your argument to the school and the public, and we find out who wins. What you don't do is misinterpret legal language in a contract as saying you have power you don't and then gleefully provide quotes in articles that essentially amount to, "We got one over on a higher education institution and now they can kiss our collectively bargaining asses."